Norway Killer Asks for Medal in Court Appearance

Perhaps worried Norway had momentarily forgotten about how much it hated him, Anders Breivik put on a show of being a hero in his court appearance Monday, demanding a medal and saying he acted to prevent "cultural destruction." According to a Reuters report, the accused mass killer smiled as he entered the courtroom for a hearing on whether he would stay in custody, while the Associated Press noted that he asked for a medal for what he did. "The attacks on the government headquarters were preventive attacks on people committing cultural destruction of Norwegian culture and Norwegian ethnicity," he said, according to Reuters. Breivik has not denied detonating a fertilizer bomb at the government headquarters in Oslo and then carrying out a massacre at a Labor Party summer camp on the island of Utoya on July 22 last year.

Predictably, the court ordered Breivik back into custody until the trial starts in April. But the hearing did give Breivik a chance to speak publicly for the first time in a while, and what he had to say did not sit well with his victims. "It wasn't good that he got to say what he wanted to say," Amel Baltic, a 16-year-old survivor of the Utoya massacre, told the AP. "It made me irritated." Even Breivik's lawyer seems to have written him off as a fanatic, describing the outstretched arms with which he gestured in court as "some kind of right-wing extremist greeting."

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